In 1746, Jonathan Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. He wrote it in the midst of the First Great Awakening, attempting to explain the nature of true Christian conversion.
At the beginning of the book, Edwards provides three benefits that trials bring to “true religion.” They are below:
- Trials help distinguish between true and false religion – Edwards writes, “Trials, above all other things, have a tendency to distinguish true religion and false, and to cause the difference between them evidently to appear.”
- Trials reveal the beauty of true religion – Edward writes, “trials not only manifest the truth of true religion, but they make its genuine beauty and amiableness remarkably appear.”
- Trials purify and increase true religion – Edwards writes, “another benefit of such trials to true religion, is that they purify and increase it. They not only manifest it to be true, but also tend to refine it, and deliver it from those mixtures of what is false, which encumber and impede it; that nothing may be left but that which is true.”
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